A New Connection in Stockholm
Ardis Grosjean
When "Overlook. American Contemporary Art" opened in Stockholm’s Gallery Infra on January 21 this year, there was strong, visible confirmation of an arts network that has been taking international shape in the past year or two. The three participating artists have their roots in the U.S. (Michael Zansky) and in the former Soviet Union (Arcady Kotler and Elina Kotler), but all are active in New York, where the Kotlers have been established since 1988. The Stockholm show was part of a larger literary and artistic initiative which spans several disciplines and claims a triple base in Stockholm, Moscow and New York.
Behind the "Overlook" show we find the recently formed enterprise, Ars Interpres Publications, and behind it in turn is Russian-born Alexander Deriev, now living in Stockholm. He is fully at home in the arts and in literature, and has a talent for bringing together poets and artists from around the world. Exhibitions are one facet of the Ars Interpres activities. Public readings by internationally acclaimed poets are another. Tying it all together, and providing both a poetry forum and an arts showcase is the journal Ars Interpres which, after only a year and a half, has already produced five far-from-slender numbers. At the Gallery Infra show a new double number of the journal was presented, while the main spotlight was of course on the three artists and their works.
Michael Zansky, sculptor and mixed-media master, whose work was seen recently at ARCO in Madrid, exhibited some of his free standing kinetic constructions, where motors, lenses and cast shadows require the viewer to look, and look again. Hanging near these prototype sculptures were large color photographs–digital prints of outdoor scenes. Once again Zansky made use of lenses in unique ways–here to distort only selected pictorial elements–with hallucinatory results.
Arcady Kotler and Elina Kotler, both now firmly established in the U.S., had separate sections in the Infra Gallery. Elina Kotler, Moscow-educated painter, book illustrator and more, exhibited a selection of New York rooftop and skyline scenes. Exquisitely draftsman-like and painterly at the same time, they were chosen from her very personal visual calendar, A few days in September, executed in sepia toned acrylics. Arcady Kotler, whose works span many media, lined the gallery walls with arresting reliefs from his "Intersecting Senses" series where eyes, earsü mouths are both embedded in and emerging from vast white walls at the viewer’s eye level. A zippered set of lips, a tiny, unexpected window that gives access to the outside world, these and other elements call into question aspects of communication, of reception and of comprehension. A varied backdrop of sound is also part of the exhibition. Kotler goes beyond Minimalism to create for us a place of disconcerting encounter.
On January 19, two days before the Gallery Infra show opened, there was another Ars Interpres event in Stockholm, an event which will leave a lasting mark. Here again international cooperation was the key. At a special ceremony, a tri-part permanent installation was donated by the artist, Arcady Kotler, to the Ports of Stockholm Group, the Stockholm harbor and maritime agency that has been an important patron of Ars Interpres Publications from its inception. The installation, originating in Kotler’s "Intersecting Senses" series, will be on permanent view at the Ports of Stockholm headquarters. A work created in New York by a Russian-born artist and honouring the contribution of a Stockholm agency to an international arts venture–here is the Ars Interpres concept in practice.
Arcady Kotler has a relationship to Ars Interpres publications that goes farther back than both his donation and the January exhibition. In fact, he and the journal’s prime mover, Alexander Deriev, are a team. It is Kotler who, from the very beginning of the publishing venture, has functioned as Art Editor of Ars Interpres. Each of the volumes illustrates Kotler’s wide-ranging artistic taste and expertise. This fits right in, as it should, with Deriev’s boundary-leaping editorial policy, where poets from Australia, Iceland, Eastern Europe and Spain are juxtaposed with interviews (the recent interview with Seamus Heaney is a case in point) and with articles on the difficult art of translating poetry. The best way to gauge the quality of the artists and the varied visual media collected in the Ars Interpres volumes is to thumb through them.
Do you want to encounter idiosyncratic and unforgettable works? See the article on the brilliant eccentric, Sergey Kalmykov, who died in Alma-Ata in 1967 (Ars Interpres, no. 1). In the journal’s no. 4/5 you can meet Pavel Zaltsman, a painter and graphic artist who left Leningrad/St. Petersburg and, like Kalmykov, spent his last years in Alma Ata, dying there in 1985. Perhaps even more unsettling are the works of Eric Pervukhin, educated in both Russia and the U.S., whose paintings and prints have themes long sanctioned in religious art, but which breathe violence and a seductive corruption (see no. 4/5).
Kotler and Deriev cast a wide artistic net. This is especially apparent in no. 4/5, which contains the near-abstract, near monocolored works of Berlin artist Ute Ludwig, the elegant verticalities of Christopher Rådlund’s paintings (a Swedish artist working in Norway) and the sensitively linear paintings of the young Norwegian, Gøril Fuhr, where the early Picasso references are overwhelming. In several numbers we can experience the paintings and drawings of British artist Dennis Creffield, including examples from his commission to draw all the medieval cathedrals of England. "Only drawing is real," writes Creffield, "and I only feel real when I draw." In addition, Ars Interpres also provides, especially in no. 3, refreshing doses of visual humor.
Though it gives space and attention to the visual arts, Ars Interpres is not a large glossy production. Nor is it a classic "little magazine," concentrating on presenting the works of aspiring poets. Most of its literary contributors have achieved international renown, a few are just emerging, others have attained the status of dead-and-famous. The journal is normal book-size, and therefore its illustrations are not large. This is the price one gladly pays for what is one of Ars Interpres most intriguing characteristics–its ability to mix text and image.
For a long time now, artists and poets have been adding words to images and images to words. What is special in the Ars Interpres approach is its inclusion of these hybrid forms in its literary and artistic panorama. Here is flexibility and variety in the way expressive forms are combined within the confines of the page. For example, text can be added to image in order to clarify. This is the case in volume no. 2, which has three reproductions of sculptor Leonid Lerman’s heads from his series "The Last Man." A short text has been inserted, indicating how this work, including the title, was influenced by the French thinker, Maurice Blanchot. In the same number we find a different take. Reproductions of two works by Brooklyn painter Bradley Rubinstein appear in conjunction with a separate but related narrative text in dialogue form by art essayist Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, dedicated to Rubinstein. In this same volume we find a third type of juxtaposition where a poetic text is complemented by the author’s own photography. This is the case with the Trappist monk Paul Quenon where, on the page facing his poems, we find two of his abstract color photos.
Some of the most refreshing text-and-image works are found in the light-hearted number 3, entitled Blessing of the Beasts. Here two artists from the Iberian peninsula, J. M. Calleja, a multimedia artist, and the Catalan poet Antoni Albalat, are presented in a major article by Hispanicist Laura López Fernández. Albalat produces visual poetry, often including insects, in almost endless variety. Typical of his inventiveness is a whole alphabet consisting of snails in various positions. In this same number there is also the whimsical Russian pair, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, U.S. residents since 1978. We are introduced to their proposals for architectural collaboration with beavers, and their artistic and photographic endeavors carried out with elephants and with Mikki the chimp.
From the beginning, photography has been one of the pillars of the Ars Interpres internal structure. Albalat has his own way of reworking photographs, as can be seen on the cover of no. 3, whereas the Polish-born Swedish photojournalist Jurek Holzer does, by his own account "simple journalistic stuff (that) can seem pretty metaphysical…" British-based Petra Creffield is represented in several numbers, including four color photographs from her "American Dream" series. The three artists from the January show in Stockholm, Michael Zansky, Arcady Kotler and Elina Kotler can of course also be found within the pages and on the covers of the Ars Interpres volumes. For instance, the cover and pages of no. 2 carry eloquent reproductions of carved reliefs and sculptures from Zansky’s ""Giants and Dwarfs" series.
"Overlook. American Contemporary Art" was the first exhibition organized by Alexander Deriev and Ars Interpres publications. At the moment of writing, there is another show of works by these New York artists in the making. It is scheduled to take place at a Stockholm gallery in April.
Ars Interpres calls itself "An International Journal of Poetry, Translation & Art." The number of literary journals that pay attention to the visual arts is not large. The number of such journals that organize and co-sponsor exhibitions is even smaller. Those who transport artists and their works from one continent to another must be very few indeed. Exhibition number two, the April show, is almost upon us. One hopes the Ars Interpres concept will flourish and continue.
